I went from party-animal student, to student with partner-expecting-child, to terrified-student-father in a matter of months (let’s assume it was 9…). This little template helped me no end, and it’ll certainly help you, too. It’s thorough, well planned, and has a number of savings and planning functions.

A big part of understanding your budget is effective money management: where it’s coming from, where it’s going, your debtors, your creditors, and everything else you can think of. When you have so many different sources coming into and out of multiple checking accounts, plus a mortgage, plus your business accounts, you can quickly lose track of incomings and outgoings. Unless you use a handy spreadsheet like this:

I’m planning my wedding at this very moment. Huhrah /s. At the moment, the immense excitement is being seriously overawed by the minute finance management my partner and I seem to spend most of our waking time talking about. We’ve kept right on top of things using a dedicated Event Budget planner – and so far it’s helped us come in way under-budget.

We’ve used it for our wedding planning, but you can use it for your fundraiser, your social event, or if you’re throwing a big ol’ shindig.

It isn’t the flashiest, but you can add On Track Targets, calculate donations for specific period, or donations for a single day.

Maintenance Schedule Template

Home ownership comes with many additional tasks, aside from the massive repayments. You can no longer call your landlady and cry down the phone because the gas boiler is broken and you really, really wanted a hot bath.

No, you’ll need to keep up with regular home maintenance or else it’ll literally start falling apart. Keep abreast of what needs doing, and when, with a handy home maintenance template. In this case, I’ve used an inbuilt Excel template as it has everything I need, but you can search for ones that suit your home repair schedule.

You can use Excel as an effective CRM system for your business. Streamline communications with existing and potential clientele to gain a competitive edge, using a free template. As they say, take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.

Inventory Management

Running a small business – or a large one – requires organization. If you’ve a warehouse full of stock, you need to keep track of each coming and going, ensuring that each day your database is updated. It doesn’t take Warren Buffet to understand stock management. This is an inbuilt Excel template, but there are plenty more available across the web.

Managing your employees is essential – they’d be mighty disappointed if they realized all of their financials were written on a napkin, stashed underneath that snazzy Home Depot paperweight. Use a preformatted template to keep track of your employees – their total and hourly rates, their SS numbers, their over-time status, and 401(K) contributions.

Planning Templates

Are you a project manager? Or builder? Or simply work in an office, with deadlines? Let’s go further: do you actively plan aspects of your live to ensure there aren’t any massive blips? You’ll love these Excel planning templates.

I’ve only just started using a continuous monthly calendar, but it has quickly made a few differences to my work flow. Along with the budgeting, getting to grips with a real-life work flow following the many years of university was a challenge, but something I’ve steadily improved on over the years. Little tools like this can make all the difference if you’ve several different sources of work running concurrently, with smatterings of deadlines along with more work appearing.

Keep abreast of your hours worked. Even if you have a login system in the workplace, you should be tracking your hours. If there are any discrepancies or shortcomings in your paycheck, you’ve tracked each and every hour worked. It also helps you plan your incomings and outgoings a little better, and understand the value in time.

Excel Template Sources

Once you start managing more of your life with Excel templates, you’ll have so much time for other activities, you’ll have to design a new template to keep track of your new-found time-wealth. And hopefully some monetary wealth, too.

Do you use templates? What’s your favorite time-saver? Are you a meticulous planner? Let us know below!

That is a template provided directly by Microsoft. If you have Office 365 or Excel 2013 you can search it under the template Screen upon opening Excel. If you dont, you can find it and download it from Office.com.